gradual change of intellectual climate had reduced. to the condition of rank superstitions. It preserved some of its own, which a still further extension of the same change is assuredly destined to reduce to the same condition; but, nevertheless, along with them it cherished sentiments which the world will never willingly let die.

The one cardinal service of the Christian doctrine, which is of course to be distinguished from the services rendered to civilisation in early times by the Christian church, has been the contribution to the active intelligence of the west, of those moods of holiness, awe, reverence, and silent worship of an Unseen not made with hands, which the Christianising Jews first brought from the east. Of the fabric which four centuries ago looked so stupendous and so enduring, with its magnificent whole and its minutely reticulated parts of belief and practice, this gradual creation of a new temperament in the religious imagination of Western Europe and the countries that take their mental direction from her, is perhaps the only portion that will remain distinctly visible, after all the rest has sunk into the repose of histories of opinion. Whether this be the case or not, the fact that these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature, will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods of which man is capable, must

ultimately ally themselves with something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised deities of the falling church. And if so, then Rousseau's deism, while intercepting the steady advance of the rationalistic assault and diverting the current of renovating energy, still did something to keep alive in a more or less worthy shape those parts of the slowly expiring system which men have the best reasons for cherishing.

Let us endeavour to characterise Rousseau's deism with as much precision as it allows. It was a special and graceful form of a doctrine which, though susceptible, alike in theory and in the practical history of religious thought, of numberless wide varieties of significance, is commonly designated by the name of deism, without qualification. People constantly speak as if deism only came in with the eighteenth century. It would be impossible to name any century since the twelfth, in which distinct and abundant traces could not be found within the dominion of Christianity of a belief in a supernatural power apart from the supposed disclosure of it in a special revelation.1 A præter-christian deism, or the principle of natural religion, was inevitably contained in the legal conception of a natural law, for how can we dissociate the idea of law from the idea of a definite lawgiver?

1 See Hallam's Literature of Europe, Pt. I. ch. ii. § 64. Again (for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. § 53. See also for mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary, s. v. Viret.

The very scholastic disputations themselves, by the sharpness and subtlety which they gave to the reasoning faculty, set men in search of novelties, and these novelties were not always of a kind which orthodox views of the Christian mysteries could have sanctioned. It has been said that religion is at the cradle of every nation, and philosophy at its grave; it is at least true that the cradle of philosophy is the open grave of religion. Wherever there is argumentation, there is sure to be scepticism. When people begin to reason, a shadow has already fallen across faith, though the reasoners might have shrunk with horror from knowledge of the goal of their work, and though centuries may elapse before the shadow deepens into eclipse. But the church was strong and alert in the times when free thought vainly tried to rear a dangerous head in Italy. With the Protestant revolution came slowly a wider freedom, while the prolonged and tempestuous discussion between the old church and the reformed bodies, as well as the manifold variations among those bodies at strife with one another, stimulated the growth of religious thought in many directions that tended away from the exclusive pretensions of Christianity to be the oracle of the divine Spirit. The same feeling which thrust aside the sacerdotal interposition between the soul of man and its sovereign creator and inspirer, gradually worked towards the dethronement of those mediators other than sacerdotal, in whom the moral timidity of a dark and stricken age

had once sought shade from the too dazzling brightness of the All-powerful and the Everlasting. The assertion of the rights and powers of the individual reason within the limits of the sacred documents, began in less than a hundred years to grow into an assertion of the same rights and powers beyond those limits. The rejection of tradition as a substitute for independent judgment, in interpreting or supplementing the records of revelation, gradually impaired the traditional authority both of the records themselves, and of the central doctrines which all churches had in one shape or another agreed to accept. The Trinitarian controversy of the sixteenth century must have been a stealthy solvent. The deism of England in the eighteenth century, which Voltaire was the prime agent in introducing in its negative, colourless, and essentially futile shape into his own country, had its main effect as a process of dissolution.

All this, however, down to the deistical movement which Rousseau found in progress at Geneva in 1754,1 was distinctly the outcome in a more or less marked way of a rationalising and philosophic spirit, and not of the religious spirit. The sceptical side of it with reference to revealed religion, predominated over the positive side of it with reference to natural religion. The wild pantheism of which there were one or two extraordinary outbursts during the latter part of the middle ages, to mark the mystical influence which Platonic studies uncorrected

1 See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.

by science always exert over certain temperaments, had been full of religiosity, such as it was. These had all passed away with a swift flash. There were, indeed, mystics like the author of the immortal De Imitatione, in whom the special qualities of Christian doctrine seem to have grown pale in a brighter flood of devout aspiration towards the perfections of a single Being. But this was not the deism with which either Christianity on the one side, or atheism on the other, had ever had to deal in France. Deism, in its formal acceptation, was either an idle piece of vaporous sentimentality, or else it was the first intellectual halting-place for spirits who had travelled out of the pale of the old dogmatic Christianity, and lacked strength for the continuance of their onward journey. In the latter case, it was only another name either for the shrewd rough conviction of the man of the world, that his universe could not well be imagined to go on without a sort of constitutional monarch, reigning but not governing, keeping evildoers in order by fear of eternal punishment, and lending a sacred countenance to the indispensable doctrines of property, the gradation of rank and station, and the other moral foundations of the social structure. Or else it was a name for a purely philosophic principle, not embraced with fervour as the basis of a religion, but accepted with decorous satisfaction as the alternative to a religion; not seized upon as the mainspring of spiritual life, but held up as a shield in a controversy.